In 1958 Edward Banfield’s The Moral
Basis of a Backward Society generated an intense debate among Italian
and foreign sociologists. The dispute centered on “amoral familism”, the key
explanatory concept of the work. The debate remains open. The
American scholarly interpretation of primigènius is in all
likelihood a mistake. Expanding the analytical focus, similar explanations
for the Italian social, economic and political backwardness can be traced far
earlier: the “land of self-interest” by Leon Battista Alberti; or the particulare by
Guicciardini. The representation of the Italian structural (cultural?)
absence of civicness developed over the centuries and it first belongs to the
identity self-recognition given by Italians themselves. Only afterward,
with the travel notes of those taking the Grand Tour, this depiction becomes
part or the Italian hetero-recognition operated by Northern Europeans and North
Americans. When an identity features acquires a “double recognition” for
such long historical time, it becomes a tòpos, a cardinal point of
the individual and collective representations of a people. Those who
defend different and contrasting theses other than Banfield face another
obstacle: the rhetorical power of the expression “amoral
familism”. Constructing new and equally effective synthetic phrases,
obviously as the result of good theoretical interpretations, seems the only
hermeneutical path to take. To this end, it is necessary to “fight” in the
same research field: a questionnaire will never undermine the narrative devices
constructed through the ethnographic observations of a researcher who goes into
the field — and remains there for a year. If it is clear that one can do
better than Banfield, it is also clear that he/she must try to do
so. There is an additional barrier for those who intend to propose
alternative readings of the Italian modernization process: the “weight” of the
Italian social reality, experienced both firsthand and through the media, tends
to reinforce the familistic-particularist interpretation. Melding together
the structural and cultural approach — avoiding any neurotic repression
mechanism — seems as the only escape for half a century of theoretical impasse.